Tuesday, July 7, 2015

After the Charleston Murders

After the murders the only
thing most people want to talk about is flying the
Confederate flag. We have heard of the decisions of eBay and other
large Internet merchandisers to take Confederate flags off their list
of articles for sale.

After nine highly respected
African-American Christians are murdered in their church, talk is
focusing on the Confederate flag, a symbol of racism. Surely our
question should be: will removing the symbol, reduce the intensity of
racism?

Even more important is this
question: what can be done to put an end to these, by now quite
common, murder sprees that kill innocent citizens? One time the
victims are moviegoers, then they are schoolchildren and their
teachers. Now the victims are black worshipers at a prayer meeting.

Taking down the Confederate
flag does not address the question of how to reduce the incidence of
these mass murders.

A frequent prescription is
additional legislation regulating the sale and ownership of handguns.
But that seems unlikely to have any effect in the next 50 or 100
years. Our country is awash in guns. The numbers themselves are
controversial but even the people who claim that gun ownership is
receding believe that one in four households of Democrats or
Independents owns one or more guns, while among Republicans the
number is one in two households owning lethal weapons. Other surveys
claim that for every hundred residents in the US there are 88
guns—that's more than one gun for every adult.

Both high and low numbers make
it very clear that there are so many guns in circulation that anyone
planning mass murder will have no difficulty procuring the weapons
needed. Gun control will not make ordinary citizens safer.

A number of commentators,
including a speechwriter for Hillary Clinton, have pointed out that
our government is narrowly focused on terrorists connected to the
parties fighting in the Mideast and seems completely unconcerned
about addressing the problem of domestic terrorism. The killer in
Charleston claimed to have wanted to touch off a "race war."
He surely is a textbook example of a terrorist.

“In the 14 years since the
September 11, 2001 attacks, nearly twice as many Americans have been
killed by white supremacists, right-wing extremists, and other
non-Muslim domestic terrorists than by people motivated by "jihadist
ideology," a report by the New America research group published
Wednesday has found.

Using a database that catalogs
information on U.S. citizens and permanent residents engaged in
"violent extremist activity," the report, Homegrown
Extremism 2001-2015, found that 48 people were killed by non-Muslim
terrorists during that time frame, as opposed to 26 who were killed
by self-described jihadis.” (http://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/
06/24/domestic-terrorists-more-deadly-jihadis-report)

The FBI and other government
agencies are constantly arresting young men who are planning to fight
with ISIL in Syria, or who are accused of planning terrorist attacks
in the United States. Sometimes these plans are discovered because
one of the participants decides to betray the plot to the government.
Sometimes potential pro-Muslim terrorists are discovered by following
peoples' wandering through the Internet and social media.

It seems quite clear that
similar efforts should be made to discover potential mass murderers
before they execute their plans.

But that is not a comfortable
conclusion. The discovery of potential jihadists terrorists requires
many people following the Internet and email activities of a
significant number of American citizens. Potential terrorists are
found only because all of us are not only potential but actual
subjects of government surveillance.

Government surveillance of
citizens is not new. Think of the decades of anti-Communist
persecutions. The techniques of surveillance are different in the
current technological climate. But the long history of government
spying on ordinary citizens should make us very reluctant to
recommend an extension of government surveillance.

Now we face just that
suggestion of seriously extending surveillance in order to discover
not only potential terrorists connected to the Mideast and religious
conflicts but the much larger number of actual and potential
terrorists plotting mass killings and, specifically, plotting attacks
on citizens of color. This is clearly a difficult choice.

But as the victims of the
Charleston church massacre are being laid to rest, and we mourn the
death of a group of outstanding American citizens, it is very
difficult not to support a significant extension of government
surveillance in the hope of preventing future mass shootings.